Xbox Announces Creation of Xbox Labs, a Small Game-Building Team

Xbox announced the creation of Xbox Labs on October 13, 2026, describing it as a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists. The team is tasked with turning emerging ideas into things players and developers can experience, according to news.xbox.com.

Xbox said the group will build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating. The company also said it will share the tools it builds with developers across the industry.

Scott was asked to stand up Xbox Labs, and the announcement was made in a message authored by Asha.

Xbox said people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing its games. The company added that it remains committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to its hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP.

Older context

The first video games emerged about 75 years ago. Xbox previously brought hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live, and later Game Pass and cloud gaming. In recent weeks, games were decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were not designed for, with Windows PC builds translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to browsers via WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter approaching 90% global browser support. Some of the biggest games were remixed into the source code of another.